101–110 of 141 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that possible without special hardware to detect EM radiation?
You usually need an antenna, yes. Does that matter?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that possible without special hardware to detect EM radiation?
Well "special hardware to detect EM radiation" is most often software-defined radios like HackRF or BladeRF among others down to TV reception dongles you can get for a few dollars (search for RTL-SDR)
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It can't just be turtles all the way down.
Is it a known phrase or your good sense of humour?
From the speed figures (many hours of setup and runtime, very low read rate) I can suggest that restarting your important service often, and moving it between VMs, would prevent an attack like that. In many deployments, automatic scaling and failover already provide the necessary mechanics. Then the Chaos Monkey suddenly becomes a security enforcement tool :)
You know what software's like, though. What today takes the blood of a virgin and a dozen dribbly candles will be doable next week with a toothpick and three cc's of mouse blood.
Shortly after I joined Microsoft in 2004, all new feature work on Windows Longhorn (Vista) was halted. There had been yet another high profile computer virus on Windows XP caused by a buffer overflow. It was an all-hands-on-deck type moment. Everyone spent weeks adding SAL (source-code annotation language) annotations to the entire Windows code base. SAL annotations enabled automated source code analysis to identify…
Are there tools for developers to use these (e.g. with VC++), or are they all Microsoft internal?
Whenever you have sharing, you usually have side channels. We're going to see more and more of this until we have much better hardware isolation. This is a kind of obvious variant of Rowhammer, which hasn't generally been fixed AFAIK. Hardware in the late 2010s seems a bit like Windows in the late 1990s - a house of cards waiting to collapse, but the dominant vendors know that very few customers are willing to pay mo…
Whenever you have sharing, you usually have side channels. We're going to see more and more of this until we have much better hardware isolation. This is a kind of obvious variant of Rowhammer, which hasn't generally been fixed AFAIK. Hardware in the late 2010s seems a bit like Windows in the late 1990s - a house of cards waiting to collapse, but the dominant vendors know that very few customers are willing to pay mo…
Real-world side channels are going to start getting more attention as the technology and techniques for extracting information from EM radiation from circuits (not radios) leaking state improve.